


The Ones Left Behind

by SpookySad



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Biblical References, Like At Least Ten Locusts, Locusts, Lots of Locusts, Murder, Post Rapture, Swarm Rhymes with Storm lmao, TOPFL January Challenge, The Rapture, The Ten Plagues, citrus, post apocalyptic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 08:56:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13520880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookySad/pseuds/SpookySad
Summary: Josh has an orange and Tyler has a secretOr the fic where the world ends and Josh ends up hiding out in Tyler's car from a swarm of locusts.





	The Ones Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> I heard 'holed up in a storm' and decided that bugs were close enough. I mean, it's natural circumstances that bring the boys together and won't let them leave
> 
> well...

There comes the sound of wings: a distant roaring ocean that feels like a foghorn going off beside Josh’s ear. He sucks in a breath and gasoline fills his mouth making his teeth ache like he’s chewing on aluminum foil. The hose slips from his mouth and gas runs useless onto his dirty shoes. One hand fumbles with the cap to the gas can while his head spins trying to find the wings, but in a street lined with buildings, the sound is coming from everywhere. 

The roar gets louder, the click of a thousand thousand wings. It feels like they’re already all around him, in his eyes so that he can’t see and down his throat until he can’t breathe. His hand slaps against the handle to the car he was siphoning gasoline from. The hot metal scalds his palm and doesn’t budge—he’d known that, he’d known it was locked, had already checked to see, hoping that maybe there was something useful in the glovebox like candies or sunblock or Chapstick. But the sound of wings makes him desperate, makes him forget the things he knows and makes him hope for things that can’t be true. There are no buildings in sight that haven’t been looted, their windows smashed and glass littering the sidewalks. Some of the cars in the street are fresh, though: windows up and unbroken. Josh gets his palm burned half a dozen times and still no handle gives. A cloud moves over the sun giving him some mercy from the endless, scorching heat—but that’s no cloud.

The locusts don’t come from one direction but every direction. When the plagues had first appeared, the locusts hadn’t had much effect on the people in the cities; it was the green towns, the Midwest, the suburbs that had suffered, stripped of every last living plant. Josh had watched it on the news with his parents, fields melting into streams with no plants to hold them in place, great tornadoes of dirt and dust. When the crops were gone and there was nothing else to eat, the bugs had changed their tastes. Now instead of empty fields, Josh saw bare bones, skeletons stripped of flesh and muscle.

Josh can feel the rush of wind, the deafening buzz of wings stinging against the back of his neck and he runs faster, pumping his legs harder until his heart feels close to bursting. There is probably not a single good left in the world, but he still doesn’t want to leave it. He thinks of his family and the slim chance that they are still alive and he can’t believe that this is how it ends, that he was meant to come so close to being back home and then fail—

—and a handle finally gives. Pulling open the driver’s side door, Josh dives inside the tan, abandoned four-door. A handful of locusts make it in with him, bodies plump with god-knows-what, and he smashes them underneath his palms as he slaps them against the window.

The locusts haven’t figured out how to open doors yet, but Josh doesn’t plan on underestimating them. He bangs his fist on the automatic lock, hoping against hope that the battery in the car has enough juice to do that at least. He hears the clicks all around him, the sweetest sound he’s ever heard. His adrenalin is still up, heart beating in his ears even though it feels like it’s fallen somewhere down in his guts. Hands drift up to clutch at the steering wheel, ten and two. He closes his eyes against the windshield covered in dark, wriggling bugs.

There is a crunching from the backseat. Maybe it’s instinct, maybe it’s terror that freezes him. His eyes flicker up to the rearview mirror and he gets a glimpse of a dark, skinny shadow sitting in the back, palm pressed to its mouth. There is the brief click of wings, and the figure dashes after a locust that Josh had missed, snatching it between dirty fingers and bringing it to its mouth. Josh can’t speak. He can’t breathe. He turns his head and takes in the figure there: a man, all sharp angles and skin and bones with shadows in his eyes.

“Do you always break into people’s cars?” The guy licks his fingers the way Josh used to after eating a greasy pizza slice. His voice is low and without intonation: threatening, or just bland?

“It was unlocked,” says Josh.

“It wasn’t an invitation.”

“Sorry,” says Josh, not feeling sorry at all. “I had to get away from the bugs. As soon as they’re gone, I’m gone.”

The man in the backseat reaches up and begins to pick at a sore beside his mouth. His nails are blunt and raw, like he’s chewed them down too far. Josh presses himself against the driver’s side door, prepared to split, but only if he has to. Some people lost their minds after the Rapture, when so many of their families and friends had disappeared and when the plagues had swallowed up everything. Some people are worse than the bugs. Josh waits to find whether or not this guy is.

“What’s in it for me?”

Josh squints through the darkness thinking of all the things he’s not willing to give up. His backpack suddenly feels weighed down with rocks. There isn’t much in this new world that has value, but everything he owns is carried there on his weary shoulders in the bag with tearing straps stained with his sweat. The man in the backseat has torn the sore on his mouth open and blood drips down his chin like a teardrop. “What do you want?”

With a muttered _Scooch over_ , he shifts his weight to maneuver himself into the driver’s seat, shifting Josh aside. _My car, I get the driver’s seat,_ he says. He smells acrid as he passes, sweat, maybe vomit. Sweat drips down his forehead, but he’s bundled up in an Ohio University hoodie and shivering. He reaches out and Josh flinches, thinking that he means to touch him, but he puts a hand on the top of Josh’s pack and stares. One of his eyes in filled with blood. “Tempt me,” he says.

Josh tenses: could he take this guy, if he had to? Probably. Josh could probably wrap his hands all the way around this twiggy man’s neck, could choke the life out of him, maybe, if fear helped, if fear made him strong like it sometimes could. He thinks about what is in his backpack and teeters on the edge of indecision, wondering if it’s worth killing over. The straps of the bag slip off of his shoulders.

Too many maybes.

“I’m Tyler,” Tyler mutters, unzipping the bag.

“Josh,” Josh says through clenched teeth.

Tyler glances up and looks at him with a strange fondness. He smiles, and there is something caught in his lower crooked teeth. Josh thinks it might be a wing. “You are the first living person I’ve seen in twelve days.”

“No offense, but I wish I wasn’t.” _Big fucking offense, though_ , Josh thinks, watching as Tyler methodically takes every item out of his backpack and rests them with undue gentleness on his lap: screwdrivers, extra tubing for his siphon, gloves, a spare pair of sweaty clothes, two tactical knives. What kind of a normal fucking name is Tyler, anyway? Tyler isn’t the name of a guy who hides in the backseat of his car like a spider in a web. Tyler isn’t the name of a guy who eats bugs.

“Are you all alone?” asks Tyler.

“No,” Josh lies.

“Good.” Shrugging a shoulder, he wipes his bloody mouth on the sleeve of his hoodie. “I hope they come looking for you soon.”

Josh doesn’t know what to make of that, whether to be glad there’s no one else out there going to stumble into this guy’s clutches or whether to wish he did have some backup. Reaching the bottom of the bag, Tyler is about to turn it over and shake it out when he sees _it_. Bloodshot eyes widen, bloody lips growing slack.

“Is that—?” Tyler plucks it from the bag: a single orange. It’s small, possibly puny, but Josh knows the weight of it is ripe. The skin is just beginning to go soft, and as Tyler turns it over in the dim light coming in through the cracks of bugs against the windows, there isn’t a spot of white mold. Not yet. They both stare at it like it’s gold. Maybe it’s just his imagination, but he can smell it: the bright, burning citrus. Tyler’s mouth waters and he wipes it on his sleeve again. “Where did you find it?”

“I found a tree,” Josh says. “I broke in to a ritzy apartment building in Indianapolis and spent a few days going through the rooms. There was a greenhouse on the roof with citrus trees inside. Oranges, lemons.” He’d camped out there and eaten until he’d puked, burning vomit coming out of his nose. When there weren’t many left, he’d emptied the trees and taken the rest with him, rationing them out. This orange was the last one.

“Le-mons,” Tyler says, stretching the word out like he hasn’t heard it in so long that he’s forgotten what it means. He picks up one of the knives from Josh’s pack and uses the dash as a cutting board. He licks the line of juice from the dust and the blade of the knife and holds the orange between his hands like it’s a bowl of soup. Juice bursts from the fruit as Tyler buries his face in it, and Josh can imagine it, remembering the first orange he ate on that rooftop, the way it had burned his raw, chapped lips and the sour taste of the rinds, the way he’d torn it apart with his fingers, too hungry and desperate to free his knife from his bag. “This—this is good. This is _good_.”

Josh can’t watch anymore. He turns to the windshield and watches the bugs, stomach rolling with nausea, hot with fury and helplessness.

“You know,” Tyler says through a mouth full of pulp. “The locusts are kind of cute. Do you ever think that?” Josh doesn’t bother answering. He has to concentrate on sitting very still, otherwise he might strangle this weirdo. “They didn’t have much of a taste when they only ate fruit. Now they taste…I don’t know how to describe it, really. Like chewing on bacon fat. You—you are what eat, I guess.”

“I think they’re letting up,” Josh mutters, squinting at the windshield. He’s not sure if that’s true, but he hopes that speaking it out loud might make it true. The sooner this swarm passes, the sooner he can split. Find a car with the keys inside maybe, even if he has to haul a corpse out of the way like last time. Make it across town to the house he grew up in. He hopes that it’s the one place on earth untouched by the Rapture, that the yard is lush and green, that his family is sitting down to one of his mother’s incredible dinners.

Tyler starts in on the other half of the orange, slower this time, not as ravenous. His fingertips are red and raw like his eyes and mouth. They both stare at the windshield, the blanket of wriggling bugs.

“Sometimes,” say Tyler. “I think about rolling down the windows and just letting them in. Do you know what I mean?” _I wish you had_ , Josh thinks. He just nods, but the lack of response doesn’t deter the other man from continuing. “I figure that what I did to be left behind was so bad that I probably should be dead.”

“What do you mean?” Josh asks.

 “I mean—there must be reasons why we were the ones left behind. Sins. We’re, you know, the bad guys.”

“I’m not a bad guy,” says Josh.

“No?”

“ _No_.”

“Then why you?”

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. All he’s had is time to think about it ever since the day he woke up at his college in LA to find he was the only one of his roommates left. “I don’t know for sure,” he says. “I guess that I never really believed in all that. God, the afterlife. I thought it was all bullshit.”

Tyler clicks his tongue, rolling the mostly uneaten orange half between his dirty hands. “Amateur mistake.”

Josh rolls his eyes. “What did _you_ do?”

“How well do you know your Bible? I’m talking about Exodus.”

“Not well,” Josh says.

Tyler hums. He licks his fingers, and Josh swallows hungrily. All he tastes is gasoline. “The book of Exodus is the one that has the plagues in it. The ten plagues God sent to Egypt to convince the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from enslavement. It started with Him turning the Nile into blood.”

Josh blinks. “Are you sure? I thought the frogs came first.”

“Frogs did come first—here and now. But back then it was the blood. Then frogs. God went all out of order, see; He was all over the place. Some plagues he skipped all together, like the hail and the gnats…and the Firstborn Sons.”

“Firstborn sons,” Josh repeats.

Tyler nods. “Yes. It’s why we celebrate Passover. God make all the slaves put blood over their doors as a ward and sent an Angel to kill every firstborn son in Egypt, only passing over the houses where the mark was made.”

Josh shudders. All those old, dusty Bible stories that he’d heard in school carried enough weight now to turn his blood cold, like the worst fairytales come to life. They had never bothered him so much—when he hadn’t believed in them. So many _had_ believed, though. Josh couldn’t imagine loving a God so cruel.

“It’s giving me the creeps just thinking about it,” admits Josh. “I’m a firstborn son.”

Tyler smiles unhappily. Whatever was in his teeth is gone now. His lips are red and wet and match his raw fingertips. He picks at the sore by his mouth until it bleeds again, staring into the locusts. The darkness hides half his face and turns the blood dripping down his chin black. “So was I: the oldest of four. The plagues, they were coming out of order, and some weren’t coming at all. How was I to know that He would skip reaping the firstborn sons, scything us down like grain in the fields? If I had known, I never would have done what I did.”

It’s too creepy for him: the near pitch blackness, the endless hum of wings on the glass, the cloying scent of orange in the air, sharing worst sins with an omnivorous weirdo. Josh doesn’t want to know what Tyler’s done, but he asks anyway, _What did you do?_

“I guess it was going to be a sacrifice, like when Abraham is visited by the angel who tells him to kill his son because God wills it. Part of me thought that if I made them go away, then I would be passed over. The rat poison was taking too long—even when I put it in their food at every single meal. I think Zack was beginning to catch on, _these Cheerios taste funny, Ty, can I have eggs instead?_ and I couldn’t have that—I couldn’t. It was life or death, kill or be killed. I waited until they were sleeping and went to their rooms one by one: my sister first, because she has her own room and because she screams the loudest. Zack and Jay were hard. I had to smother one while the other was _right across the room asleep_. And then—” Tyler huffs out a laugh. “—and then He didn’t kill any of the firstborn sons, anyway. I didn’t have to do any of that stuff at all. Ha! Isn’t that—isn’t that  _funny_?”

No one is laughing but Tyler, not Josh nor the locusts. His laughter cuts off, stuck in his chest like his throat is full of stones. There is the smallest change in pitch. He’s not laughing anymore but crying. Josh looks at the windshield. People crying makes him uncomfortable; in some ways, it makes him more uncomfortable than Tyler’s confession had.

Tyler sniffs and wipes his nose. There are traces of pulp on his fingers unlicked, the orange only half-eaten in his hands, and it’s such a waste. That’s all Josh can think: what a waste. The loss of his orange burns him more than the idea that Tyler killed innocent kids, his own siblings. Maybe that’s just another reason why Josh is down here and all the good people are Up There. The movement of the bugs reminds him of the static on television and he gets lost in it. They are slowing down: moving on to easier prey as the scent of Josh fades with the wind.

“Well?” Tyler says, his voice wet with tears and snot. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“It’s a shame,” Josh mutters.

Tyler nods. “They were good kids.”

Josh was talking about the orange, but oh fucking well.

There is a click, uncomfortably close to the sound of wings. Josh flinches like it was a gunshot, craning his head to see what Tyler is fiddling with that’s making such a noise—and if it’s a bug, another one of those goddamn locusts, then he’s done, he’s almost willing to tuck and roll right out of the car door to avoid another stomach churning sight like watching this guy eat another bug—but it’s just Tyler pressing the automated button that controls the windows, tapping a dirty finger on the arrow pointing down.

“What are you doing?” asks Josh.

Tyler doesn’t answer. Tap tap tap _taptaptap_. His other hand comes up, orange abandoned on his lap, and he reaches past the arch of the steering wheel towards the ignition—

—which has the key in it.

“No!” Josh shrieks. He strikes Tyler’s arm, but his wrist has already turned the key. The lights come on above their heads, the windshield wipers shuddering and displacing the bugs who seem to sense the turmoil in the car, who seem to sense that dinner time might be coming. They start to grapple, Josh wrapping his hands around Tyler’s throat like he’s been dreaming of since they first set eyes on each other. Tyler doesn’t seem to care that Josh is squeezing the life out of him, his bony hand banging around the driver’s side door, still trying to lower the windows. The contents of Josh’s bag fall off of the other man’s lap, rolling around by the gas and brake pedals.

He grabs the door handle instead, and for all the effort Josh was using to pull Tyler closer, as soon as the door clicks open, Josh is pushing him away. The center console digs into his hipbones as he shoves Tyler, momentum threatening to spill him out into the street too. The sound of the locusts rise up now that there is no glass to muffle the noise—or maybe they get louder with the promise of food. Using all of his weight, Josh pulls the driver’s side door shut. One of Tyler’s feet is in the way, the bones in his ankles cracking. Josh lets the door open just enough to push him out fully before slamming it shut.

A few stray locusts buzz around his face, the ones unlucky enough to end up on the wrong side of the glass. He smashes them, their bodies crunching in his sweating palms and between his fingers. Outside the car, Tyler is screaming. For all the effort he wasted trying to let the bugs in, he’d had quite the change of heart when faced with them. There is the thud of flesh on metal as Tyler begs to be let back in. Josh locks the doors, shaking all over.

It doesn’t take long for the screams to stop. It takes longer for the desperate banging of Tyler’s fist to cease. The swarm has increased, the smell of blood calling to them, but it doesn’t matter. The gas gauge reads as nearly empty, but that’s okay too: he has a gas can nearly half full waiting for him. All he has to do is out wait the bugs, out wait Tyler. By the sound of things, he’s already succeeded on one of those. There’s no harm in waiting a while though—just to be safe.

He reaches down and finds the half of the orange that’s still mostly uneaten. Josh eats the pulp and rind and all, and when he’s done, he licks his fingers clean.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got something I need to tell you but AO3 won't let me. Seriously. :/ it's on Twitter though. Check my pinned. @Spooky_Sad
> 
> I'm taking requests btw. I'll do your crack fic right, stg. 
> 
> Thanks to Sam W, Brea M, adsnoggin, Aubrey S, Mellisa P, and Kenzie G. <3


End file.
